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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/30029142">come, give me your hand</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/BiblioMatsuri/pseuds/BiblioMatsuri'>BiblioMatsuri</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>DP Side Hoes Week 2021 [6]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Danny Phantom</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Character Study, Ectoplasm, Gen, Headcanon, Worldbuilding</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 23:48:37</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,000</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/30029142</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/BiblioMatsuri/pseuds/BiblioMatsuri</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Stains on skin can fade on their own. It takes a few days, to make new skin and discard the old, but they wear out.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Danny Fenton &amp; Valerie Gray, Valerie Gray &amp; Damon Gray, Valerie Gray &amp; Spoiler Character, Valerie Gray &amp; Vlad Masters</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>DP Side Hoes Week 2021 [6]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2199633</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>27</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>come, give me your hand</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Or, Valerie reenacts <a href="http://shakespeare.mit.edu/macbeth/macbeth.5.1.html">Act 5 Scene 1 of the Scottish play</a>.</p><p>// Based on the DP Side Hoes Week prompts for 3/13/21: Valerie and hero.</p><p>TWs: vomit ment, past canon-typical violence, blood. Weird green ghost blood, though.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>There’s ectoplasm under her nails.</p><p>That’s not weird.</p><p>It dries fast. Evaporates, really – or sublimates?</p><p>One of those. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is she gets it out from under her fingernails before her dad thinks to check on her. He just got home, and he’s still puttering around the living room putting all his work stuff away for the night. Valerie has maybe five minutes before he wonders why she’s still got the faucet running.</p><p>At this point, no amount of soap and scrubbing is going to get this stuff out. Ectoplasm dries fast, and it always stains. Stains on clothing sometimes come out, if you wash it right away.</p><p>Stains on skin can fade on their own. It takes a few days, to make new skin and discard the old, but they wear out.</p><p>Hair is a bit trickier. Hers is brown-bordering-on-black, or a black with brown lights in it. Ecto-stains on that just leave a little bit of a green undertone, like a bad dye job. Ugly, but it could be worse. She could be Star, or Dash.</p><p>She snickers.</p><p>Blondes look like they just got puked on, afterward. And there’s nothing for it but to cut the contaminated hair off. Dyeing over ecto-stains just does not work. The dye only sets in on the uncontaminated hair, so it just ends up patchy – and still puke-colored.</p><p>That doesn’t even start on what green stains on red look like. For some reason the red color and the green don’t just cancel each other, like mixing paints. The green dissolves the red, and they end up looking like bargain-bin Christmas ornaments in shades of undead-green and redhead-orange.</p><p>So, heh. Yeah, it could be a lot worse.</p><p>Still, though, ecto under the nails is the actual worst to clean off. The stains set into the skin around your nails, and then they get absorbed right into the nail itself. Nail polish is getting more popular at Casper High, because the polish acts like clothes – it’s not alive, so the ecto doesn’t soak through it. Most of the guys go for clear, or black, but some of the school-spirit types are running with it and painting their nails team colors.</p><p>Or Phantom’s colors. That damn ghost.</p><p>Anyway. No matter how hard she scrubs it off, even if she digs every last particle out from under her nails, it won’t help with that little bit that already got absorbed into living cells. The only thing for it is to wait for her body to get rid of it in time.</p><p>On-skin ecto-exposure is only <em>mildly</em> dangerous, according to the Fentons. Ectoplasm likes to cling to anything alive, and then it doesn’t move. Even with ghost attacks happening all the fucking time now, it would take years for background levels of external exposure alone to cause any kind of health effects.</p><p>The Fentons cited studies they’d already done, on people who lived over old battlefields, or in cities that got ruined and then built back up. Everything they had agreed: you’d have to live in a cemetery for decades straight, to get permanently ecto-contaminated.</p><p>Of course, Amity Park is a giant outlier to all the data they’ve gathered, so- might want to take all of that with a grain of salt. Or a truckload.</p><p>Valerie knows better. She has to. It’s been over a year since Amity Park was first invaded by ghosts, and it leaves a mark. Even if the ectoplasmic scum get chased off, there’s still possessed victims and haunted appliances and broken buildings to deal with. You can’t wash out those kinds of stains with soap. You have to go harder.</p><p>She turns the hot water up higher.</p><p>Of course, that’s if you only get it on your skin. If you slip in a puddle, or get tangled in a net, or get glued to a wall by some hostage-taking ecto-asshat.</p><p>Ectoplasm stains. Even a tiny cut, a miniscule scrape, glows for weeks after getting it. The ground rule is:</p><p>If you’re bleeding, go talk to the Fentons.</p><p>They’ll spray you with this stuff that smells like herbs and burns like heck, and the glow goes away. Or they’ll make you an ointment, if the cuts are big enough. There’s a pill, too, but it messes up your gut.</p><p>And then you’ll be fine, for a bit. Just until the next ghost fight.</p><p>Valerie’s never gone, though. She never had to. Her first set of ghost-hunting equipment covered everything important.</p><p>Or it did, until her dad confiscated it.</p><p>Damn Phantom.</p><p>And now she has a new suit, and it still covers everything. It’s even airtight, and watertight – and everything-else-tight, too.</p><p>The ectoplasm stains, though. It goes right through anything that’s not alive, and her suit doesn’t count. Neither did her old one, but it had an ecto-repelling coating. The Fentons’ suits have it, too.</p><p>She’s used them before, when Ember kidnapped her father. The insides are nearly frictionless; they want to slide off your skin, and you have to fasten everything up securely so it stays on. The outsides are tacky, more like suede than most synthetics. The boots and gloves are probably rubber. Probably.</p><p>Aside from color and cut, her first red suit was <em>exactly</em> the same as the Fentons’ orange ones. Mr. Masters must have used the same supplier, back then.</p><p>Or more like he just stole the fabric, considering Mr. Masters is <em>also a ghost</em>.</p><p>Heh. So Valerie, Amity Park’s best human ghost hunter, was being supplied and hired by a ghost. And then she got another suit, from another ghost!</p><p>And everything is fine; she’s just fucking dandy.</p><p>She’s just got to scrape the last of this dried-up ectoplasmic residue out from under her fingernails. Because the new suit is good for <em>space travel</em> apparently, but it does fuck-all to keep ectoplasm out.</p><p>It’s coming out slowly, powdery green and tacky brown in little patches.</p><p>She hopes the blood is hers.</p><p>She hopes it isn’t.</p>
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